The Linguist

language teaching and learning, and identifying emerging research fields and new communities of study – help us articulate our own position in the field. It is this community of researchers that will be the force behind changes to how we approach language learning and research. Worldmaking in the time of Covid If the EU referendum meant that we started the project in a complex environment of closing borders, the pandemic meant that we came to the end of the funded part of our work in an environment of the extreme closing of borders, where we were part of a global experience but increasingly isolated from one another. In April, King's College offered 'Rapid Response to Covid-19' funding to projects with an emphasis on science and medicine. We proposed that language has a crucial role to play in understanding how Covid-19 is being lived, and used the principles of Language Acts and Worldmaking – that language is a material and historic force – to make a call for a deep and textured understanding of the pandemic. Our thesis is that we narrate everything; we construct the world around us by telling its stories; these set a crisis in context, relate it to our historical experience, help us to understand it in the context of our local communities, and contrast those stories to dominant narratives. In Worldmaking in the Time of Covid-19, we have engaged in a process of digitally mining sources from European languages, Arabic, Cantonese, Hebrew, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and Russian. We work with student linguists, who used digital tools such as Lexis Nexis to collect the data through which we are comparing and analysing how the pandemic has been narrated. How do words relating to war, conflict and invasion travel across the world? What new languages emerge around the experience of quarantine and lockdown, around our ideas of normality, of morality, of the future? At its most simple, these are words that describe behaviour, e.g. Covidiota (Portuguese) or 'covidiot'; a combination of two diseases, e.g. Covidengue (Spanish); the digital experience, e.g. On-nomi (Japanese) for a digital happy hour; the ways in which we prepare for lockdown, e.g. Hamsterkäufe (German) for people hoarding goods; or the symptoms, e.g. 'Dracula cough'. There are many more, and we have gathered them in our online resources section. This has been an excellent opportunity to develop students as co-researchers, giving them insight into constructing and seeing through a FEATURES @Linguist_CIOL DECEMBER/JANUARY The Linguist 15 provocation and an opportunity: it would be the place from which we could break down barriers between academic research and teaching in universities by collaborating with broad sectors of society, including education, faith groups, commerce and the third sector. Our team of academics, teacher-researchers, postdoctoral researchers and PhD student researchers is drawn from King's College London, Queen Mary University of London, the Open University and the University of Westminster, as well as modern language centres. The project started formally in July 2016, a fateful date that would inform all our thinking, as the outcome of the EU referendum shaped our engagement with the world. The funded period ended in June 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic that sees us rethinking the nature of the dynamic between the local and the global. Community building Building a community has been central to the ways in which we conduct our research. In its broadest sense, we understand this as building the capacity for creative and critical thinking. We structured our work to engage with the widest possible community of language learners, educators and researchers. At the heart of this endeavour is our Small Grants Scheme, awarding funding of £500-£1,500 through annual competitions dedicated, above all, to promoting integration and inclusion. We attract projects from people who would normally have little access to funding, or who work in areas where access to formal language teaching and university is limited. The Small Grants Scheme has become a particularly exciting part of Language Acts and Worldmaking. Through it we have expanded our research community and brought our research into the public sphere. This has included community work with the Domestic Abuse Research Network (DARNet), led by Dr Olumide Adisa at the University of Suffolk, for an event working with migrant and refugee women; collaborations with prominent artists such as Caroline Bergvall and her Ragadawn project; writers and translators supporting residencies at Cove Park; and schools like Queen Katharine Academy in Peterborough celebrating their multicultural community. We have been introduced to innovative, consistently thought-provoking work, which helps us to meet our core objectives while offering welcome challenges. These challenges – e.g. enhancing inclusion and diversity in ONLINE INFLUENCE How does our (often monolingual) digital experience shape our perception of the world around us? © SHUTTERSTOCK

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